Jeffrey Vagle

Position / Title:

Affiliate Scholar

Links:

Faculty Website

Twitter

Contact:

jeff@vagle.se

Focus Areas:

Architecture and Public Policy

Privacy

Areas of Expertise:

surveillance

Privacy

Terrorism and Democracy

Cybersecurity

Jeffrey L. Vagle is Lecturer in Law and Executive Director of the Center for Technology, Innovation and Competition at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. His research interests include surveillance law, cryptography and cybersecurity law, electronic privacy, Internet architecture, and networked economies and societies. A particular focus of his work is the study of the societal, political, historical, and economic effects of government surveillance, especially among marginalized or disenfranchised populations. Mr. Vagle writes and speaks regularly on privacy, data security, surveillance, and other cyberlaw-related topics, and is the author of several law review and technical articles, including, most recently, “Furtive Encryption: Power, Trust, and the Constitutional Cost of Collective Surveillance,” forthcoming in the Indiana Law Journal. He earned his JD from Temple University School of Law, where he was Editor-in-Chief of the Temple International and Comparative Law Journal. Mr. Vagle is also a veteran, serving in both the U.S. Marine Corps as an infantry non-commissioned officer and in the U.S. Army as an intelligence officer.

Call For Papers: The Cambridge Handbook of Surveillance and Race

By Jeffrey Vagle on March 28, 2018 at 7:59 am

The editors of the forthcoming Cambridge Handbook of Surveillance and Race seek additional contributors. This volume will bring together the work of leading scholars in such fields as public health, law, critical race studies, anthropology, criminology, sociology, history, political science, psychology, and philosophy to present an intersectional perspective on the issues of governance, power, and control as applied to racial and other minority populations.

"Neural Lace," Extended Cognition, and Privacy

By Jeffrey Vagle on March 27, 2017 at 3:42 pm

Imagine a world, not as distant as we might like to think, where our individual thought processes are aided and improved by technologies external to the biologically-bequeathed neural matter that sits within our skulls and throughout our nervous systems. Further, these technologies are designed and optimized to perform these functions in such a way as to become automatic or invisible to their user. And rather than act as simple one-way conduits or repositories, they actively drive their user's thinking in a manner that creates a two-way, symbiotic interaction between human and device.

Cybersecurity, Unscrupulous Diners, and Internet Stewardship

By Jeffrey Vagle on October 22, 2016 at 8:57 am

The extended DDoS attacks over the past few days that triggered widespread outages and Internet congestion are more than a mere annoyance. Rather, these instances have proven to be increasingly sophisticated efforts to strike at core networking protocols—the infrastructure that makes the Internet operate—to render large portions of the network inoperable or inaccessible. Perhaps the greatest irony of these complex attacks has been the fact that they have been conducted on the backs of some of the dumbest devices out there—the so-called "smart" devices that make up the Internet of Things (IoT).

Technological Redlining

By Jeffrey Vagle on July 19, 2016 at 2:56 pm

As the phenomenon known as Pokémon Go has rapidly established itself as the latest distraction (or obsession) for the growing numbers of people with GPS-enabled smart phones, we have begun to see some of the surprises and challenges that often accompany new technologies (or new uses of existing technologies). And while some of these issues are interesting only in their triviality, others have raised more serious questions about our norms, our values, and the structures (visible and invisible) that we have erected (explicitly or tacitly) as our society has progressed.

Government Cheating on the Sotomayor Surveillance Scale

By Jeffrey Vagle on August 24, 2015 at 9:59 am

In her concurring opinion in US v. Jones, 565 U.S. ___ (2012), Justice Sonia Sotomayor brought up a crucial point regarding a democracy's natural acceptance or resistance to government surveillance. As you may recall, the Court in Jones addressed whether the government's attachment of a GPS tracking device to someone's car in order to continuously monitor their movements constitutes a search or seizure under the Fourth Amendment.

Jeffrey Vagle

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